My first job in hospitality was on the reservation phones at Vidanta in Mexico, in 2010. Years later, when hoteliers ask me about their hotel website conversion rate, those calls are the first thing I think of.
Someone would call, excited, ready to go. Then somewhere in the conversation they’d slow down. Usually the pause meant there was something they hadn’t said yet, and the job was to find out what it was.
Most of those calls I’ve forgotten. One I haven’t. A young man rang to book a trip on his parents’ membership. He was taking his fiancée, or maybe by then his wife, to Mexico for her first time, and he had it worked out: the Riviera Maya, the Cancún area, white sand beaches.
I always made a bit of small talk to find out what people were really after, and with him it came out quickly. He wanted the trip to be romantic, and he wanted to show her traditional Mexico. So I suggested Puerto Vallarta. It was the destination I knew best, and to me it had something magical about it. He hesitated. He’d already pictured the trip, and I was asking him to picture a different one.
I told him what I honestly thought. The Cancún area has a lot more tourism and, in my opinion, felt quite Americanised in places. Puerto Vallarta has old buildings, small streets and a character of its own, much closer to the traditional Mexico he wanted to show her. By the end of the call he’d booked it. We added a couple of notes to the reservation so they’d get a bit of extra care at check-in, and after the trip he called back to say how happy he was with it.
What he asked for at the start and what he actually wanted were two different trips, and it took a conversation to find that out. A hotel website never gets that conversation. The guest who slows down there doesn’t explain anything, and working with hotels on their direct bookings, I keep seeing those silent pauses. There’s nobody on the line to hear them.
What is a good hotel website conversion rate?
No single number fits every hotel, because the rate depends on what kind of property you are, where your traffic comes from, how much of it is already looking for you by name, how many rooms and rates you sell and how well the booking engine works on a phone. A small hotel with plenty of returning guests and a large chain-style site selling to strangers face very different odds, and comparing their rates tells you little.
If you want a benchmark for context, the most solid figure I’ve found comes from h2c, a hospitality consultancy: across 76 mostly regional hotel chains, bookings averaged 1.9% of website visits in 2019, up from 1.1% in 2015, and about three times that for visitors who reached the booking engine. It’s chain data from before the pandemic, so treat it as a rough guide, especially for an independent hotel. Your own number matters more, tracked month by month and split by device. If it drops after you change something, you’ve learned something, and a phone-versus-desktop split is the quickest way to find out what.
The rate can’t tell you why guests leave. A visitor who lands on your site, finds no answer to a small question and goes off to compare you elsewhere is one visit that didn’t convert. A guest who gets all the way to the booking engine and stops at the last step is another. In the analytics both show up as booking abandonment, whatever the cause was, and an agent on the phone could hear which one it was.
Why guests stall halfway through booking
Guests seldom seem to hesitate over the big things, because they’ve already chosen your hotel or at least your town. What stalls a booking is a small, specific worry that nobody has answered: whether the room is close to the beach or “close” the way every listing says close, whether they can cancel if a flight moves, where the car goes.
The ones I heard most were simpler still. How far is it really from the airport, and what does a taxi cost? Are the waves calm enough for the kids to swim? Is it safe? Does anyone there speak English?
On the phone, a good agent hears the worry and answers it on the spot. On a hotel website the guest goes looking for the answer, doesn’t find it, and opens Booking.com in another tab. An OTA listing carries a map, a cancellation policy and a pile of reviews, and somewhere in them someone has mentioned the parking. Some of what hotels call an OTA problem probably starts at that moment.
A call from someone already on your website may be their second try at an answer. That’s worth knowing, because it tells you the question was a fair one and the page didn’t have the answer.
The price and the room they couldn’t pin down
The gap I’d look for first is the price. The guest wants to know what it will cost for their dates and their group, with the kids, and the page doesn’t say. Sometimes the rate sits behind a date picker that has to be filled in first. Sometimes the page shows “from” and a number that no real room at that time of year would sell for.
I understand why hotels do it, because the “from” price looks good next to the competition. Then the guest compares it with a real price on an OTA, sees a gap, and wonders what else has been tidied up. I’d rather show a realistic price for a normal week and say plainly that peak dates cost more, because a guest can plan around an honest number and walk away from a flattering one.
Room names cause the other half of the trouble. “What’s the difference between the deluxe and the superior?” is a fair question, and the names were obvious to the people who chose them.
New members often didn’t know our room names yet. A master room, a suite and a master suite sound close enough, and they were very different things. It rarely turned into a real mix-up, because on the call I’d walk through each one: how many bedrooms, how many balconies, what set it apart from the next one up. On a website, the page has to do that explaining by itself.
A room type is a promise about where you’ll sleep, so guests want the size, the view, the floor, the bed set-up and whether it’s the one with the balcony. When the page leaves that out, they either call or pick the cheapest and hope. A few lines per room and two or three photos taken from the bed, the window and the bathroom door do more here than a longer description of the hotel’s philosophy.
Booking engine abandonment at the last step
I spent time in retention at Vidanta, saving deals from people who wanted to cancel. Booking engines have their own version of that moment.
Some guests never get as far as the booking engine. There’s one hotel website I keep going back to, which I won’t name. Right on the home page, the booking widget has a button to close it. That widget is the one thing a guest who’s ready to book is looking for, and I still can’t work out why you’d let them put it away.
The guest who does get there has picked dates, maybe a room, and then something makes them stop. A resort fee or city tax appears on the final page, or a form asks for far too much, or the page suddenly looks nothing like the hotel they were just browsing. Most of the big markets now require the full price up front. In the US, the FTC’s fees rule has required hotels to show the total price with mandatory fees included since May 2025. The UK banned drip pricing in April 2025, and its guidance names resort fees and tourist taxes as part of the headline price. EU consumer law expects the total price, fees included, wherever it can be worked out in advance, and regulators have already made Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia change how they show prices.
Whatever the rules say, a guest who chose a room at one price and sees another at the end feels a bit tricked, and an explanation about the small print doesn’t undo that.
Back to the pause
Go back to the pause on the phone, the moment a guest slows down and says they’ll just check something. On a call, a good agent hears it and asks what’s on their mind. On a website the same guest says nothing, and all you get is a session that ends on the booking page. Analytics show where that happened, and the questions your reservations desk gets are where I’d look for the reason.
If you have a reservations team, go and sit with them for an afternoon, or ask them to write down every question guests ask in a week. It’s the cheapest research you’ll ever do. Then open your own website and try to answer each of those questions without calling anyone. Wherever you can’t, that’s where your guests are pausing.
I heard those pauses live for years, and I still read a conversion rate as a record of them.
More on this from the Hospitality Marketing Lab channel:
Resaco’s piece on why SEO and marketing alone won’t fix direct bookings picks up where this leaves off.